MaximumPC 2007 H

reviews Tes Ted. Reviewed. veRdic Tized

8 MAXIMUMPC holiday 2007

L

abel us Luddites for resisting

Windows Vista, but there’s no arguing

the point that the new OS currently

offers very little you can’t get faster with

Windows XP. That goes double for games,

which is why we’re baffled by HP’s decision

to run Vista Ultimate on the groundbreaking

Blackbird 002 gaming rig it sent us.

We’re equally surprised that HP sent us

a machine it knew would blue-screen when

going into suspend mode (and then leave it

to us to discover this). Those two decisions

are unfortunate because nearly every other

facet of the Blackbird is utterly brilliant. Here’s

proof that HP’s acquisition of VoodooPC was

much more than an opportunistic move (by

a company that many gamers dismiss as

stodgily conservative and more appropriate for

middle-aged newbs) to glom on to the cachet

of a high-profile boutique PC vendor.

Actually, we’d argue that HP shed its

old-fogey image months ago when it shipped

the superbly designed TouchSmart IQ770

(reviewed April ’07). Although that desktop sys-

tem is also limited to Vista, the embedded 17-

inch touch-screen LCD justifies the decision

(and you wouldn’t play games on it anyway).

The Blackbird is a different story. Although

HP tells us consumers will be

able to order machines with

either XP or Vista, we review

rigs as they are sent to us. As

for the blue-screen issue, HP

says it’ll have it fixed before

you read this review.

Those issues aside, HP

and Voodoo deserve high

praise for building an excit-

ing and innovative personal

computer while using industry-

standard parts for every key

component. One glance at the

all-aluminum case reveals that

it’s highly customized; none-

theless, it will accommodate

any ATX motherboard and any

standard power supply.

Swinging open the side

access panel, which easily lifts

off its smooth-as-silk hinges,

reveals an Asus Striker Extreme

motherboard. In a ballsy move,

HP adjusted Nvidia’s nForce

680i SLI BIOS to allow a pair of

ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT cards

to run in CrossFire mode—

tweaking the noses of AMD

and Nvidia in the process.

Each of the Radeons is out-

fitted with 1GB of DDR4 RAM

and cooled by an Asetek LCLC

liquid-cooling system. The LCLC also wicks

heat away from the 3GHz Intel QX6850 (Core

2 Extreme quad core), which HP overclocked

to 3.76GHz. You can order a Blackbird with

an X-Fi soundcard and an Ageia PhysX card,

but our unit had neither (relying on Analog

Devices’s Integrated Digital SoundMax HD

Audio for sound, installed on a riser card to

escape electrical noise on the mobo).

The Topower Computer TOP-1100W DVT

power supply is rated to deliver 1,100 watts

(the 2900 XTs, you’ll recall, are insatiable

HP Blackbird 002

Vista clips this bird’s wings

The Blackbird has the best access panel we’ve ever seen on

a PC, with a chrome-plated latch, slick hinges, and a foam-

rubber gasket that dampens all vibration-induced noise.

CPU Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850

quad core (3GHz overclocked

to 3.76GHz)

MOBO Asus Striker Extreme

(Nvidia nForce 680i SLI)

RAM 2GB Corsair Dominator XMS2

DDR2 (800MHz overclocked

to 1,066MHz)

LAN Dual Gigabit LAN (Nvidia)

HARD DRIVES Two 160GB Raptors (10,000rpm

SATA) in RAID 0, one 750GB

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10

OPTICAL Two TSST TS-T632L

DVD burners

under the hood

Brains

VIDEOCARD Two ATI Radeon HD 2900

XTs with 1GB GDDR4 memory

in CrossFire

SOUNDCARD Analog Devices Integrated

Digital SoundMax HD Audio

CASE HP Blackbird

BOOT: 62 sec. DOWN: 11 sec.

BEaUTY

Close this swing-out panel and its spring-steel strips will

push installed PCi Express cards firmly into their slots.

benchmarks

sYsmark 2004 sE 275

zERO POINT SCORES

Premiere Pro 2.0 3,000^ sec

Photoshop Cs2 295 sec

recode H.264 2,648 sec

fEar 1.07 80 fps

Quake 4 110.5 fps

0       10%  20%        30%         40%         50%         60%         70%         80%         90%         100%

Wnr

1,380 sec (+117%)

131 sec (+125%)

Wnr

105.3 fps (-5%)

130 fps (+38%)

Our current desktop test    bed is  a   Windows XP  SP2 machine,    using   a   dual-core   2.6GHz  Athlon  64  FX-60,  2GB of  Corsair DDR400  RAM on  an  Asus    

A8N32-SLI   motherboard,    two GeForce 7900    GTX videocards  in  SLI mode,   a    Western    Digital 4000KD  hard    drive,  a   Sound   Blaster X-Fi    soundcard,  and 

a   PC  Power   and Cooling Turbo   Cool    850 PSU.